Tearing through Portugal on a Red Bull Binge

Writing on the train ride from Lagos to Porto on Monday for my last night in Portugal before I fly to Paris tomorrow (Tuesday…yup, didn‘t get this up last night like I wanted, it‘s now Tues). It’s really hard to believe I’ll soon be at my last stop in Europe. I’ve been traveling for 9 weeks now. In some cases it still feels like I just got here, but in other ways some of my early stops seem like a lifetime ago. Like Oktoberfest in Munich. I can’t believe I was there just over 6 weeks ago…feels like that could have been Oktoberfest ‘07 or something.

In general I think most of the decisions I’ve made along the way were the right ones. The majority of the hostels I picked were pretty perfect, and the groups of people I’ve chosen to spend my time with have worked out well too. I enjoyed nearly every place I visited (minus Pisa, and Naples sorta). There’s also the balance of nighttime activities--whether to stay in and get a normal night’s sleep, or go out and most likely be awake until the sun’s about to rise. And of course, there are the money decisions. A lot of these choices are of course somewhat random at first (picking one hostel over another just from reading about it online for example), so there’s clearly some luck involved.

Well over the past 10 days, I got lucky enough to nail these decisions, and it set up an incredible three nights in Lagos (Southern Portugal). From Malaga to Tarifa and finally three nights in Lisbon, I chose to lay low most nights and that spared me physically & financially. I couldn’t understand why I never once checked out the nightlife in Lisbon, a major European city that’s supposed to have great bars & clubs. I guess I just lacked motivation. Again this ended up being perfect because I’m pretty sure over these last three nights in Lagos I spent more money and drank more alcohol than one person should ever try to do. If I had been physically or financially drained coming into Lagos, well that really would have sucked. If you’ve read my extremely long piece about Barcelona and got a feel for my eight days there, then consider my experiences in Lagos like a mini-Barcelona. Actually that would be shortchanging Lagos a bit. Not even in Barcelona did I wake up as hung over as I was in Lagos. Between that & the sleep deprivation there’s only one annual experience to compare it to: Vegas every March.

Ok enough of that serious shit. Time for stories & pictures.

Lisbon was a solid 2 ½ days of sightseeing. It’s a small enough city that it can definitely be done in that short amount of time. Walking around on my first day, I realized it’s a lot like San Francisco. It’s so much like SF that I actually got a tiny bit freaked out that someone drugged me and put me on a plane home.

From the disgusting amount of hills and the cable cars…

To the bridge that is eerily similar to the Golden Gate…

I know it’s hard to tell from those pictures, but the bridge is also orange. I later found out that the same person or people who designed the G.G. Bridge designed this one in Lisbon too.

My favorite thing about Lisbon was visiting the Castle of St. Jorge, not because the Castle

itself was particularly great, but because I got to see these people play the role of medieval

characters and take their jobs way too seriously:

Three other quick things to say about Lisbon:

-The hostel was fine, but it was definitely in the sketchiest neighborhood for any hostel yet. The hostel manager assured us that all those guys on the streets around us were “only trying to sell us drugs, not harm us in any way.” That was some great reassurance.

-After only two days in Portugal, it was already safe to hand them the “Least Helpful Train Employees” award.

-For the first time on this trip, I ate something and was completely unaware what I was eating. Still don’t know. It was a sandwich that might have had breaded chicken, fish or some other mystery meat inside.

Ok, on to the fun stuff in Lagos. First of all, I stayed at this hostel:

I almost wanted to investigate with the employees why they named it that, but I decided to just leave it alone. Apparently the owner is from Boston. The guy working at the front desk goes to Northeastern and is “working” in Lagos as part of his co-op. Tough way to spend college.

Lagos is known for its beaches and relaxing atmosphere, not a ton in the way of sightseeing. My first afternoon here would be the only time I actually left the hostel during the day to do something besides eat. I thought I was going to spend time on the beach at least one day; never happened. As a matter of fact, the following pictures were taken on my two hour walk around the town in the early afternoon when I might have still been impaired from the night before.

So yeah, beautiful area, but circumstances made it impossible to enjoy during the day. When I checked into the hostel on Friday night, the guy told me from 9-midnight they were doing an unlimited beer & sangria for 5 Euro in the common rooms and then taking everyone out to bars (yup, just like Barcelona). As usual it was extremely easy to meet good people at the hostel, and just like in Barcelona there was a stable group of us that hung out together all three nights. We lost some people each night, but there were 4 Australians I spent the most time with: Mark (my roommate), Chris, Sarah, and Jada (or maybe Jaida, not sure).

On Friday night, I forgot to bring my camera with me, but it doesn’t matter because we went to the same exact bars at the same exact times every night. So let’s flash forward to Saturday night.

The first bar stop (every night) was Three Monkeys...

They’ve got two beer bongs (funnels) at this bar, and they have a board to tally up which country does the most funneling each year.

The first thing I did was put up a 1-spot for the U.S., but as you can see we are still trailing Australia by 347. That’s downright embarrassing. Also, you may notice that Alaska is on the board separate from U.S. Fine, screw you, Alaska. When 2a.m. rolled around and they were closing down, I thought I heard the bartender yelling, “Get out,” to everyone. No, he was yelling, “Get up!” So we all stood up on the bar and danced to “Don’t Look Back in Anger” by Oasis…beyond random.

From there we went to another bar, Inside Out, and when they played Rage Against the Machine, exactly 6 of us went crazy and started dancing while everyone else looked on in horror. I believe each night we left that bar around 4:30 and on at least one night we considered going to some club afterwards but never did.

On Friday night, here is the breakdown of everything I drank: regular drinking of beer, sangria, shot gunning beer, funneling beer, jaeger bombs, kamikaze shots.

And here’s Saturday night: beer, SoCo & coke, vodka & coke, jaeger bombs.

Because of that, we all pretended we would “take it easy” on Sunday night. While we did actually start the drinking later than other nights (10:00), take it easy we did not:

Here’s my roommate Mark, who somebody nicknamed “Bic” because it seemed like he always had multiple lighters on him:

We joked that the only way Three Monkeys could follow up Saturday night’s dancing on the bar was to play Wonderwall, also by Oasis, at closing time. They did just that, and again, we’re up on the bar.

At Inside Out, the craziness ensued, especially when we invented a reason to keep doing shots: “Ross’s Last Night!”

We inexplicably tried to make a human pyramid, and while I didn’t get a good shot of it, this was the start of it:

With all the shenanigans going on, I can’t believe this was happening two feet away from us on top of the bar:

Walking home at 4a.m. on Monday morning, the gang encouraged me to take this picture:

…And just when I thought we were done, Mark bought 5 beers out of the hostel vending machine and kept the party going in our room, again because it was my last night. 20 minutes later everyone was essentially in bed, and I made the mistake of checking up on the Patriots/Colts game online. I logged on at the exact moment they took a 13-point lead with only a few minutes left. I got to see them choke the game away and even called Aaron to have him narrate what was going on for me. I’m so mad at myself for tarnishing an incredible three days with those five minutes of repulsiveness.

And finally, if anyone in Porto even asks me to go out for one drink tonight, I might slap them in the face (since it's Tuesday now, I can tell you no one tried to convince me to drink last night. I think I looked like a corpse so people just knew).